Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Match.com wants to match its members up with Facebook users

Match.com, an old standby of online dating, wants to make some new connections among the fast-growing number of Facebook users worldwide.

Dating Web site Match.com, owned by media mogul Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp conglomerate, plans to launch two new features this week that bring greater social networking capabilities to its more than 15 million Match members and to the roughly 58 million active users of Facebook.

Dallas-based Match, which started in 1995, will announce Thursday the launch of Little Black Book, a new way to link Facebook users with Match.com daters. Already this week, it has introduced Match My Friends, which allows friends or family members of a prospective online dater to create a profile for him or her - with the approval by the wanna be-dater.

"There are a lot of people out there who are interested in online dating and just need that extra push, if you will," Match.com general manager Craig Wax said.

"Both (features) are looking at the social nature of the Internet as it is today," said Kristy McKnight, vice president of product management at Match.

Little Black Book lets Facebook users sign up to see the other Facebook users who hope to date someone. Once they're signed up, users of Little Black Book will receive potential matches among Facebook users and non-Facebook users who are signed up with Match.com.

New York-based IAC owns other Internet properties including Citysearch, Evite and Ask.com.